Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday December 08, 2012 @04:42PM
from the what-can-change-the-nature-of-a-sequel dept.

Aglassis writes "Eurogamer has reported that famed D&D and computer game designer Colin McComb is working on a spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment. The game will be set outside of the Planescape campaign setting due to an inability to come to an agreement with Wizards of the Coast. The lead designer on the original game, Chris Avellone, has apparently given his blessing."
McComb posted recently about the nature of Planescape and what would define a new game. He wrote, "Any setting that rewards the player for internal exploration (certainly deeper than, 'Can I hit it? How much loot does it have?') could host a similar story. As long as there’s a fantastical element to the world–whether straight fantasy or science-fantasy–these questions become possible and desirable. The farther away we stray from comfortable routine, the more likely we are to challenge ourselves, trying to define our place in the world. A boring setting frequently leads to boring questions; we know the drill and don’t have to examine it closely. But a fantastic setting forces us to re-examine the world, to take it in a fresh light, and to see that our fundamental truths may be flawed. That is at the heart of a Torment story."

Planescape is definitely the better game overall. Baldur's Gate 1 is fun from a nostalgia view, but it really is not that great from a story angle, the characters are flat and unimpressive, and combat in most of the game is really easy and in the rest of the game it's very too hard and relies on a lot of reloading of saved games. I think the reason most people liked Minsc the most is because he had the most to say (and not that much). On the other hand, Baldur's Gate 2 fixes most of that; the characters

Planescape is one of my favorite games, and may objectively be one of the best RPGs out there, especially if you're old-school and actually want to "play" a role in the game. If you think that games like Dragon Age and The Witcher present a lot of player choices, well, they're nothing compared to Planescape.

It does involve a lot of reading, and therefore time--especially if you really want to delve into the story (GOG claims 5000 pages of dialogue, and I believe it). I think it's worth it, but I know that isn't everyone's cup of tea. If you do wind up getting it, then be sure to apply the community patches. In particular, the high-res patch is essential. There's a discussion on the GOG forums all about it.

A spiritual successor to the game would be welcome news. It'll be a hard name to live up to, but fantastic if they pull it off.

A spiritual successor to the game would be welcome news. It'll be a hard name to live up to, but fantastic if they pull it off.

Well, I have some good news for you then. The guys are Obsidian including the folks who did PS:T are working in a classic RPG to fit the bill now. [obsidian.net] Dragon Age was okay. The Witcher and Witcher 2 were good. But nothing has yet to beat PS:T but considering they've got the entire old BIS team working on PE, I have faith.

Project Eternity is not a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. It is intended to be more like a cross between Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate 2, except with a much, much, much better story than either of those. The story will be written by both the guy who mostly wrote Planescape: Torment (Chris Avellone) and the guy who wrote most of the NWN2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer (George Ziets). So the story is likely to be very, very good, but it is not intended to be any sort of successor to PS:T.

Skip Baldur's Gate 1. Baldur's Gate 2 is much better in pretty much every way. My advice would be to play both Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 2. Both are two of the greatest computer role playing games every made. Baldur's Gate 2 doesn't have a good story mainly because Bioware has never believed in bothering to hire good writers, but the combat is great fun. Especially the mage combat. Definitely try some of the mods that are available for it. Most importantly SCSII aka Sword Coast Strategems II. It

Both are really good games. As a standalone experience, I'd recommend Planescape. However, nothing beats starting a character in Candlekeep in BG1 and following the character throughout BG1 (w/expansion), BG2 and finally BG2:Throne of Bhaal.

It should be noted that BG1 (w/expansion) has just been released in an enhanced version [baldursgate.com] available on the iPad(!), Windows and soon Mac.

PST is the best game I've ever played.However, it's a story-based game in the extreme, text upon text upon text.

BG1 is fun and quirky, but very rough around the edges.BG2 is awesome RPG Adventuring with great character interaction, however, the amount of bugs and holes present in the system (especially with the awesome relationships, best ever written for a computer game by far) make it somewhat of an aquired taste.

Also, BGII starts you out at a higher level, thus making it very much harder to get into it s

Dear god I just hope they don't fuck it up with a bunch of goddamn cutscenes with mediocre voice acting. This game is why us old school computer gamers act so elitist around consolers. It's not the ability to snipe with a mouse that we're missing.

If you enjoy reading and enjoy gaming and haven't played the original Planescape Torment, go do so right now. It has 800,000 words of written dialog (and in some cases brief description of action.) For comparison, the entire Harry Potter series is around 1,000,000. And it's great dialog, really brilliant and weird and philosophical and transcendent. Play a mage, that's my advice. And make sure your wisdom is high too, so you can talk Dak'kon through his crisis of faith (this is not only one of my favorite parts of the game, but it will help you quite a bit in combat as well. If you even want to fight... I think there are only 4 mandatory battles in the entire game.)

I've played it through twice and still have loads of quests and factions and NPCs I wasn't able to find/join/experience. And I'm still searching for another answer for the question, both in the game and in real life, that you encounter again and again: "What can change the nature of a man?" Near the end of the game another incarnation of the main character will give you an answer. It's a good one, but it feels incomplete...

If you enjoy reading and enjoy gaming and haven't played the original Planescape Torment, go do so right now.

Yes! That cannot be emphasized enough.

I've played it through twice and still have loads of quests and factions and NPCs I wasn't able to find/join/experience. And I'm still searching for another answer for the question, both in the game and in real life, that you encounter again and again: "What can change the nature of a man?"

I have played through a couple of times (second time with a walk-through), but I am still trying to figure out why the "current" incarnation is not forgetting everything with every death anymore. You can lead a dialog with Nordom towards that question, even, but I couldn't get any suggestions out of him.

Alternatively, somebody made a pretty good novelization of the game. It covers most of the side-quests but, unfortunately, you do get only one of each of the major forks for obvious reasons: http://www.wischik.com/lu/senses/pst-book.html [wischik.com]

This is one of those cases I must say:Why the fuck would you change the medium of the story?

The thing which really makes the story is how you interact with it and actually experience what is happening.It's awesome and you can go exactly where you want and do exactly what you want all the time.

Don't hype it too much, you're unnecessarily raising the expectations of new players.
For someone used to modern video games, it's just not that good.

The game is absolutely excellent. It cannot be hyped too much

For someone used to mindlessly clicking on enemies and having the storyline delivered via cut-scenes, the game may not be too good. But if you are willing to read for the story, you should be fine even today

Also, while I am at it, there is a high-res mod available [gibberlings3.net]. That may be useful to today's gamer.

See, you just got my hopes up. I thought you meant this was a mod that replaced textures with higher-resolution versions; that is clearly not the case, it's just a widescreen mod (which is of course clearly indispensable, but not sufficient to make it visually tolerable).

You must have a hell lot of a hard time reading books, my friend. That is, if you try doing so at all.

There is a big difference between books and games. Some of us are more visual and just cannot shut that portion of us down if there is any kind of stimuli; with books there is no stimuli at all so there it doesn't bother, but with Planescape: Torment and similar games there is visual stimuli, no matter how hard you try to ignore it, and therefore it changes the whole thing.

Still, 10 years ago everybody, even the "visual inclined ones" wanted to play games with similar graphics and thought their graphics the most beautiful thing in the world. Obviously the visual stimuli aren't bad. The problem is the way you see it and it is not instinctive as you may seem to think, it is learned. You feel the graphics are bad because you have seem better, more realistic graphics in today's games, but the graphics are not unpleasant at all. You just have to stop being picky and enjoy the stor

Well, considering I work in the front of a computer 8 hours or more a day (like most people who post in this site) and play games (even games without much text), the time spent reading books and dialogs on screen is hardly significant. And my vision is actually a little better now than it was a few years ago. My Astigmatism degree went from 1.5 in both eyes to 0.75 and 0.5. It is at the point where I don't need glasses anymore.

Is that actually possible? Can you effect permanent physical chances in your eyes by constantly focusing at short distances? Because, intuitively, you really shouldn't be able to - the only difference between looking at a screen or looking at something far away is how much your focusing muscles have to work, which might exhaust them for a few hours but not permanently.

Ok, I see where you're coming from now. Yes, retro graphics can be jarring at first. Like watching 480i after you got used to 1080p. But if you play it for a few hours, you should adjust. It's an unconscious process. The visual processing parts of our brains are wired to spot patterns, to suppress image distortions, not emphasize them.

But what you are ignoring is there are a lot of people that like RPGs that don't go for the text heavy D&D style and by hyping the hell out of it all you're doing is setting up all those that aren't into harcore D&D style role play for a disappointment.

I'd suggest that anybody who hasn't played it look up one of those "Let's Play" videos on YouTube for it and if it looks interesting to them THEN they should buy it. After all everyone has different tastes and the hard core role playing as opposed t

Most so-called computer RPGs don't deserve that name. Skyrim, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, etc., aren't RPGs. They are great games, but they are still just action games with role playing systems. The amount of "role playing" is minimal. In those games, your job is to kill the enemy to advance the plot and gain skills. I know this sounds like a simplification, but the plots of these games, while excellent, are just window dressing to the hack and slash. The much ballyhooed role-playin

RPG is a spectrum, based on how "on rails" it is. If there's multiple ways to solve a problem you don't even have to solve, that's probably high up the RPG scale. Obviously Torment is a grand example, but KOTOR Is higher up the scale than many games...

While we normally don't agree I have to say you pretty much nailed it, all I would add is if you have skills you level up and side quests that you can choose to do or ignore that would also be RPG to me.

But to me this is why you don't just go "ZOMFG this is the BEST of (category)" because in categories this broad what may be your cup of tea might be sewer sludge to me. Take Diablo style hack and slash like Titan Quest or Torchlight series, some hate those with a passion but I just love 'em to pieces, to rip

I guess it depends on how you define "good". Can you give even one example of a modern video game which even remotely resembles Planescape: Torment? Such games just aren't being made and haven't been made since. So there really isn't anything to compare it too. Well, maybe Mask of the Betrayer, but that was technically an expansion and not a complete game in itself. The graphics will take a little getting used to if you never played early post-millenium cRPGs, but the game as a whole doesn't compare to most

I agree that, although noticeably improved from the utterly unplayable interface of pre-MotB NWN2, the interface was still awful. If you can manage to get past it though MotB was still one of the best cRPGs that had been made in years.

Fuck balance, I want to meet more letters of the alphabet. Perhaps in a bar whose mascot is an everburning archmage, a living portal to the elemental plane of fire. And afterwards haggle with the bartender to sell me back my eye, floating in a glass jar behind the bar.

Yes, you do stuff like that (actually, exactly that) in Planescape:Torment.

But I can immediately understand and relate to everything you just said. Its wacky but its not particularly alien. My concern is with comments like "The farther away we stray from comfortable routine, the more likely we are to challenge ourselves", the problem being if you stray too far the challenge of just understanding what's going on becomes less and less fun.

Eh, that you sold the guy your eye was the 'normal' part of this encounter. That you buy back the pickled eye, pluck out your current eye (the barman helpfully cuts the optic nerve) and stuff the rapidly decomposing eye in your head is the really fun part.

Planescape was such a wonderful game because there was a lot of interesting dialog (I believe all but 4 situations in the entire game could potentially be resolved without fighting, by bluff/threats/etc)

The game probably failed (commercially) because it required a lot of reading. What are the chances they will risk doing that again?

I could see a kickstarter campaign being successful. The game definitely has a following, even if it's still cult status. Space sims are pretty niche these days, and yet Star Citizen did amazingly well.

PS:T didn't fail because of the reading required. It failed because it was advertised as another 'Diablo'.

If the marketing had been better, it would've crushed. Believe it or not, ppl need to play a game before deciding it's 'too wordy'. The sale comes first, then the 'boredom'.

To whit: "It's clearly the best traditional computer role-playing game of the year and is bound to be an all-time favorite for many of its inevitable fans." ( http://www.gamespot.com/planescape-torment/ [gamespot.com] )

"I'd put it some place other than Planescape. I'd use a system other than D&D, because I'd want to align the player's story axes along different lines than Good/Evil or Law/Chaos to something more subjective"

So, it's just going to be another RPG then? Hopefully a good one with deep characters and excellent writing - but I'm sure sure how this will be the sequel to Planescape: Torment.

More than half of what made planescape torment was the planescape setting. "$unfamiliar_fantasy_setting torment" sounds less likely to draw my dollars (not that I'd pay for a DRM crippled planescape game anyway).

... while planescape was good for what it was, the huge story emphasis and the old combat system may turn off newer gamers.

Not only that planescape is closer to a visual novel then a game because of its huge over-emphasis on conversations and story, if anything planescape is closer to the cut-scene based dialogue heavy games like Mass effect then it is to oldschool RPG's - true dungeon crawlers, like say eye of the beholder, wizardry, early ultima's, etc.

Don't make a successor like that, I think it will likely suck or at least will be shied away from by gamers. They should upgradet the original game to modern graphics and interface. Keep the original story and characters. (heck even hire the original voice actors) This would be way better